An annoying autobiographical pause

I used to be obsessed with fiction. Now most of the time I'm hung up on what goes on behind the scenes: Who are the people who write this stuff? What did they think they were doing? What are their lives like?
Been reading a lot of old science fiction fanzines lately, thanks to the nice folks at eBay. (This was before I found out you can read a lot of old SF fanzines for free at efanzines.com.) These privately-produced, small magazines -- often published by someone cranking a mysterious printing machine made out of bubble gum, Scotch tape and dead frogs, usually located in someone's dimly-lit basement -- have been part of science fiction since its earliest days. SF fans felt strongly enough about the stuff they were reading that they created their own "magazines," printed them, traded them with other fans, communicated.
I stumbled over fanzines in high school. The first issue I ever read was SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW 15, edited by Richard E. Geis. (More about him in a bit.) I thought his mag was OK -- but on the back-cover was an ad for Bill Bowers' OUTWORLDS. I sent away for some samples -- the first of which turned out to be a hilarious 40-page letter-column ... and then I was hooked!
OUTWORLDS had great, funny writing, gorgeous artwork and graphics, and everybody seemed so friendly ... if not crazy. In a good way. Though SFR had stronger content and harder-hitting opinions, OUTWORLDS was a flashier package.
Found a few more copies of SFR over the years and enjoyed it -- especially the behind-the-scenes peeks into the minds of SF writers, the arguments, the feuds, the horror stories about publishing that most readers never hear.
Thanks to eBay, I've recently piled up a pretty good stack of '70s and '80s fanzines. Along with taking a 40-years-ago look back with LOCUS -- "The newspaper of the science fiction field" -- I've gotten mildly acquainted with "fannish" fanzines, which are more like walking into the middle of a conversation and trying to figure out what the current comments in an issue were commenting ON in the first place....
Some of these little mags are charming, some are just silly. And you never know when a piece of great writing is going to slap you upside the head. In that stack from eBay are articles like one fan describing how she overdosed on anti-depressants FOUR TIMES before her doctors finally got her meds right (from the zine BANANA WINGS); Bruce Gillespie admitting in his METAPHYSICAL REVIEW that he'll have to do a low-budget no-art zine until he can AFFORD to print another issue of his epic zine SF COMMENTARY; former AMAZING/FANTASTIC and HEAVY METAL magazine editor Ted White writing about the months he spent in jail after being arrested for (I assume) pot-possession with intent to sell, and admitting to embezzling money from a well-known SF writer when he got into personal cash-flow problems; Dick Geis on the death of his father; Bruce Gillespie on the unexpected death of a close friend, and a LONG write-up on Philip K. Dick's half-dozen mainstream non-SF novels....
Several of these came from Dick Geis's long-running fanzine SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW/THE ALIEN CRITIC. I think Geis, who died in 2013 at age 85, could star in a book of his own. How this cranky recluse single-handedly put out a small magazine every three months for YEARS and even managed to live on the proceeds is a heckuva story. (It also helped pay the bills that he wrote more than 100 soft-core porn novels -- some of them even got published under his real name.) Maybe this isn't a story everybody would want to read, but still....
Back in the mid-'70s, Geis predicted a massive computer network on which you'd be able to read your daily newspaper -- or his monthly outpourings. He even eventually moved to posting on the Internet, after his accumulating health problems wouldn't let him work 50 hours a week on his magazines anymore.
Geis predicted at least as far back as 1974 that the U.S. economy was going to collapse due to massive debt and over-use of credit. Despite his health problems, Geis kept writing through 2011, but I haven't yet read how he felt about seeing his predictions of massive financial ruin come true....